"Greta Garbo, and Monroe/ Dietrich and DiMaggio/ Marlon Brando, Jimmy Dean/On the cover of a magazine/Grace Kelly; Harlow, Jean/Picture of a beauty queen. They had style, they had grace/Rita Hayworth gave good face/Lauren, Katherine, Lana too/Bette Davis, we love you."

Even Madonna couldn't help but fall for the images of Hollywood icons. In her song Vogue she pays homage to the stars we see dozens of feet high on the silver screen. No wonder they are the modern day masters
of the universe.

Live by the Lens, Die by the Lens, is the major new exhibition staged from today at Bradford's National Media Museum. The show will allow mere mortals to get closer to these gods of the cinema. Garbo, Taylor, Loren, Dietrich, Harlow – the sort of stars recognisable by just one name.

Joining them are modern day luminaries such as Kate Winslet, Michael
Caine, Russell Crowe and Jude Law.

The exhibition, however, is not a mere love letter to these stars, but an exploration of how photographs of the icons contribute to the images of them we all carry around in our minds and the way that the media and Hollywood made mutually beneficial bedfellows.

A year in the making, and pulled together by the museum's curator of cinematography Michael Harvey, Live by the Lens features iconic images of cinema's greats.

"I think some visitors may actually complain about the omissions, but there is a finite amount of space, and I had to choose what we kept in and what we left out," says Harvey, surrounded by technicians applying the final touches to the show.

"That has been the hardest part – trying to decide what to keep in."

The exhibition opens with a selection of magazines and the stars who have graced their covers, setting the tone for the exhibition which is part celebration, part critique of a system that perpetuates the myth of the movie star as god. Harvey says he chose to open the show with the magazine covers to make the comment that the media and film world are of equal importance to each other.

"It is described as a symbiotic relationship – one feeds off the other," he says.

"It immediately makes the point that these movie stars come to us with an enormous publicity machine behind them.

"That machine controls – or tries to control – every aspect of how we see our stars."

From the multi-million pound publicity industry which fuels Hollywood and the way we see our stars, the exhibition travels back in time to the beginnings of Hollywood, looking at it first through the studio system and the time before there were movie stars.

"From 1910 and for the first decade of cinema, there were no film stars. It was such a young medium that actors didn't know if it would be a success and so they still believed they would have their careers on the stage."

That changed in 1917, when Canadian actress Mary Pickford secured a $1m salary with her contract with Biograph. Pickford is credited with the creation of the star system – as Harvey says: "Studios realised that it wasn't the story or the director that people were paying to see on screen, but the actors.

"The first movie stars were employed through studios who kept a very tight rein on the images of their stars."

The unleashing of these images was quickly followed by a new type of a publication – the magazines from which Hello! and OK! are direct descendants. Photoplay and Pictureplay were the first magazines published with such a specific aim in mind, but it was not long before all newspapers and magazines followed suit and began to fill their pages with glamorous images of movie stars. In order to get these images, movie stars had to add another string to their bow – the ability to come across well in a photograph.

Harvey says: "On the movie set, they were surrounded by people. In the photography studio it would be them and the photographer and maybe an assistant. Many of the stars talked about how they hated it, how they couldn't bear to be alone. Others loved it."

The masters of manipulating these fragile egos were photographers like George Hurrell and Clarence S Bull – the work of both appears in the exhibition, with photographs of Clark Gable and Greta Garbo.

Through the '20s and '30s, magazines often also insisted on not using just the photographs studios gave them, but also sending their own photographers to take pictures of the stars.

The first among these were Edward Steichen for Vanity Fair and Cecil Beaton for Vogue. Their photographs also appear in the exhibition, as does the work of heirs like Annie Leibovitz and Terry O'Neill.

By the 1950s, studios were trying to find the best way to ensure the photos of their stars appeared in the magazines they chose.

Warner Brothers Studio took the canny step of inviting photographer Bob Willoughby onto their set.

The photographer worked for several magazines, including Life, and knew
the style that was wanted by the editor of each magazine.

Willoughby said: "Warner's publicity department realised that by hiring me even if Life didn't use the spread, I could easily trot it over to one of the other magazines I was working for."

The exhibition includes the Life magazine featuring the photograph he shot of Judy Garland for the movie A Star is Born in 1954.

Harvey, taking photographs from the Kobal Foundation, the museum's own archive and the National Portrait Gallery, has also included a section of movie stills.

"People who make movies realise just how important a still is when it comes to promotion. You just need to take a look at the photograph of Keira Knightley in Pride and Prejudice and you get a feel for the whole of the movie," he says.

Also featured here is the world of the paparazzi, whose snatched images the stars cannot control.

The final section of the exhibition is perhaps the most revealing, and shows pictures the stars took themselves when invited to use a photo booth by artist Alistair Morrison. Kate Winslet and Tom Cruise appear in this section.

Harvey says: "This is the only time stars have complete control of how they want to be seen. It feels appropriate to give them the final word."

Live by the Lens, Die by the Lens, runs until Sept 28.